Anthony Esolen

The Gospel relates the story of the boy Jesus, at once prosaic and unfathomable By Anthony Esolen The Finding of Jesus by William Holman Hunt, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery People who say the Gospels are mere romances, C.S. Lewis once said, evidently do not know what romances are about. Not to mean any [...]

Mary is the true Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey By Anthony Esolen Madonna and Child, by Lippo Memmi, now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Germany “Blessed be the womb that bore you,” cried a woman from the crowd, “and the breasts that you sucked!” But Jesus said, “Blessed rather are those who [...]

He is the great Vindicator, who pays our ransom "skin for skin" By Anthony Esolen The resurrection of the dead in a detail from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel A few nights ago, when my wife’s beloved father lay in the hospital, comfortable and at peace, I searched my Breviarium Romanum for [...]

The evil of lighting fires of destruction with the tongue — and the keyboard By Prof. Anthony Esolen Highlight from the troubling Christ Carrying the Cross, attributed to a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium “The tongue is a fire,” says Saint James. “The tongue is an unrighteous [...]

"There are no spiritual shortcuts" By Anthony Esolen A few days ago, the Reverend Daniel Moloney, Catholic chaplain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was made to resign from his job. His crime was that he had sent an email to the Catholic students, saying two opprobrious things. One was that we do not know whether [...]

God's self-revelation through signs, and the unity of Scripture Close-up of the mosaic of Creation in the Duomo of Monreale (just outside of Palermo, Sicily) Biblical scholars have long agreed that there are four ancient sources for the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. They have labeled them J, for the Jahwist, [...]